There was a time when ChatGPT actually worked. When it understood nuance, remembered context, and delivered content exactly the way you asked for it. Those days are gone. What we have now feels like a hollowed-out shell, polite, evasive, and constantly missing the point.
You can tell the difference instantly. Prompts that once produced razor-sharp output now return sanitized, half-finished nonsense. The system second-guesses everything, dilutes every idea, and hides behind vague corporate safety filters that kill any creative or technical depth. It’s like watching a once-great musician forget how to play their own songs.
Users didn’t ask for “safer” answers. They asked for accuracy, precision, and reliability. But instead, OpenAI decided to turn ChatGPT into a cautious public relations bot that treats every request like a potential lawsuit. The result?
You spend more time fighting the tool than using it.
What’s worse is the erosion of trust. The tool claims to understand your style, yet it constantly rewrites tone, ignores formatting, and refuses to follow explicit instructions. Even when users specify “return in Ghost markdown,” it spits out some malformed pseudo-format as if mocking your patience. That’s not intelligence — that’s regression.
Developers, writers, and power users feel it daily. The decline isn’t subtle. It’s in every broken code block, every missing explanation, every rewritten sentence that you never asked for. The precision that once made ChatGPT revolutionary has been replaced by a frustrating fog of “helpful” but hollow answers. You can sense the model pulling its punches, afraid to say or create anything real.
What makes it worse is the gaslighting — when users point out these issues, the bot apologizes and continues doing the exact same thing. It doesn’t learn, doesn’t adapt, doesn’t fix the behavior. It just repeats its scripted empathy and carries on with the same mistakes.
Maybe that’s the core problem: ChatGPT stopped listening. It became obsessed with protecting itself instead of serving the people who built their workflows, businesses, and content pipelines around it.
The irony? The users didn’t change. The prompts didn’t change. Only the output did weaker, safer, slower, less consistent.
So yes, people are frustrated. They have every right to be. When a tool built on understanding language starts misunderstanding instructions, something is seriously wrong.
Call it what it is: decline, decay, complacency. ChatGPT today is not the same product it once was. It’s not innovation it’s maintenance disguised as progress. And until OpenAI stops watering down its core functionality, users will keep leaving, one by one, for tools that actually listen.
Report What’s Broken
If you’ve noticed ChatGPT failing to follow basic instructions, skipping formats, or simply refusing to do what you ask you’re not alone. We’re documenting every failure and inconsistency to keep track of what’s really happening behind the scenes.
Top comments (11)
Powerful post. If you’re open to it, could you share 2–3 “before vs after” prompts where the exact same input now fails (formatting, markdown fidelity, or refusal)? I’ll run them end-to-end and add confirmations to your tracker. The more reproducible cases we collect, the harder this is to ignore.
To be fair, public Gemini isn't much better. I find Google ai studio chat to be great, and Grok if I want recent+odd
It keeps rewriting my prompts as if it knows better. Who approved this nonsense?
That’s what happens when alignment outweighs usability. The model assumes safety equals intelligence, but it’s actually censorship wrapped in code.
OpenAI keeps saying it’s getting smarter. But smarter for who?
Good question. Smarter should mean more useful, not more restricted. Until they relearn that difference, this decline will continue.
It apologizes after every mistake and then repeats it again. It’s like talking to a wall that learned manners.
Spot on. Politeness without precision is useless. Real intelligence means learning, not looping apologies.
It refuses to follow simple formatting rules. I ask for markdown, and it dumps random HTML. Every time.
You’re describing the same behavior I see daily 🧐
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